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Disclaimer: I do not represent Google anymore and I am writing on behalf of myself only. I hold no ill will toward the great people there and left in September for personal and health reasons.

Hello. I’m Nandini and I enable conversations — between humans, within business, and all the combinations in between — oftentimes when there are machines involved in the equation.

We’re living in a time when innovation is shifting our outlook of the future rapidly. So rapidly that it’s worth taking a moment to stop and look around and appreciate:

• Enabling machines to speak to us out loud, and understand our deep context, puts us at the intersection of technology and the human condition.
• We’re confronting a reckoning between science and culture.

I have a lot more to say on the topic, but today is not the forum for that. Today is about continuing a conversation.

The hardest part about being a participant in a conversation is listening. So, I want you to know that I heard you. The feedback from the developer community and broader ecosystem when I was at Google was that the most valuable part of Google is its people. I can also confidently say that the many developer and design advocates in this broader ecosystem hear your need for a more steady stream of content that helps in all areas, not just tool kits.

And yes, this is just the beginning of a new conversation. A conversation about the future of technology and how — with your help — we can take a QUANTUM LEAP past the AI-first world and create a PEOPLE-first, creative approach to enable and elevate users’ ability to communciate more authentically with each other.

Ultimately, we’re creating a new ecosystem for the new economic era — the Conversation Economy.

This ecosystem requires all disciplines. It will thrive when we’re listening to diverse voices and diverse approaches, including the forward-thinking notion that we can have the freedom of expression to challenge the status quo in the name of all users everywhere.

We can be competitive, but kind.

Users come first, no matter the device, no matter the brand, no matter the voice. All else will follow. Brands and users are both finding themselves disconnected from each other in a world where people use labels for each other instead of what we stand for. But this is a new era. The one we’ve all been waiting for. The conversation economy is the opportunity for an audience of ONE. It’s where 1:1 reach manifests.

That’s the WHY. If you’re wondering HOW:

We do this through partnerships. There’s a lot of noise out there. Both outgoing and incoming. In effect, all competitors, all brands, all
technology makers, are all partners in this global shift in cultural consciousness.

To improve the lives of users, we have to cut through the noise to what matters in their lives. Find those micro moments where we can truly be assistive. So it goes the other way too. The tech companies who create the platforms for others hear a lot of noise. They have a lot of partners. Good partners are stewards of the quality of the flow of information. They surface high quality requirements to product teams so they can prioritize those features that will have the greatest impact for users in the best execution possible.

I’d like to continue to answer your call to action and give insight to the kinds of people in this ecosystem that are changing the landscape of the future of technology as it intersects with the human condition through the power of spoken language and open discourse. Everyone has a voice and deserves to be heard. We’re all trying to create and we’re all living our legacies in real time.

The many partners building in this ecosystem are doing so in unique and trailblazing ways. Given the opportunity, I look forward to having a chance to showcase what partners are doing to deliver on the vision we collectively see for the ecosystem. This means finding ways to highlight the very real struggles we all face, as well as the beautiful ways we are discovering what we didn’t know — or even better, what we knew all along and just needed a light bulb moment to define for ourselves and then amplifying for others.

It’s my personal mission to give voice to others and help create a culture where we can build experiences that illustrate our shared vision for the future. We need to collectively recognize that doing GOOD means going beyond “don’t be evil” and “doing what’s right”. I’m currently looking for the best platform to show what good looks like — literally and holistically — where creative technologists get a chance to work in symbiotic relationships for the
common good of users everywhere.

I specialize in intentional creative innovation through process consulting and thinking big when it comes to organizational challenges in the attention-starved conversation economy. I am available for speaking engagements. You can reach me by private message here on Medium, via LinkedIn, or on Twitter.

What’s next for me? More advocacy, more quality, and more partnerships. I’m looking forward to it and I have faith that you are too.

Thank you for listening, the most important duty in any conversation.